Mass Incarceration Reforms: The Alabama Experience

Alabama’s prison system has been among the most scrutinized in the United States, operating under active federal litigation over unconstitutional conditions while simultaneously enacting some of the most significant sentencing reforms in its history. Between 2013 and 2016, Alabama implemented a sequence of graduated criminal justice reforms: the transition from voluntary to presumptive sentencing guidelines, and the creation of a new Class D felony classification that established a presumption against incarceration for low-level drug and property offenses. Using facility-level data from the Alabama Department of Corrections and a state-year panel from the Vera Institute of Justice, we evaluate the effect of these reforms on both the level and racial composition of Alabama’s prison population. We employ a two-way fixed effects event-study design with a comparison group of nine states that remained untreated throughout the sample window. We find that Alabama’s total custodial prison population declined by approximately 13.5 percent between 2014 and 2019. More strikingly, the black share of new prison admissions, or the flow into prison, declined by approximately 19.6 percent relative to comparison states in the post-reform period, while the black share of the stock of the standing prison population declined by approximately 7 percent. The gap between the racial composition of new admissions and the existing prison stock widened by approximately 13 log points post-reform confirming a sharp and immediate flow-margin response.